Archive for May, 2016

New Orleans Pelicans guard Bryce Dejean-Jones died of a gunshot wound on Saturday, and the NBA player’s agent said it was because he mistakenly entered the wrong apartment.

The 23-year-old was shot early Saturday at an apartment in Dallas, police said. The apartment’s resident told officers he was asleep when an intruder kicked open the front door and entered the home. The trespasser allegedly did not respond to calls from the resident, who then retrieved a handgun. He fired his weapon when the suspect kicked in the bedroom door, according to a police report. The intruder was wounded and left the apartment.

Police found the suspect collapsed in the breezeway after responding around 3:20 a.m. and transported him to a hospital, where he died of his injuries, police said. He was identified as Dejean-Jones.

Police are investigating the incident as a homicide.

Dejean-Jones was reportedly in the area to visit his girlfriend and celebrate his daughter’s first birthday, his agent Scott Nichols told CNN and CBS.

“Bryce was visiting his girlfriend for his daughter’s first bday. This was the first time Bryce visited her new apartment,” Nichols said in a statement.

“Later that night Bryce came back to this apartment, incidentally he went to the wrong apartment on the 3rd floor just below his girlfriend’s fourth floor apartment. He was attempting to enter the apartment which led to him ultimately being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Dejean-Jones signed a 10-day contract with the Pelicans in January and then got a three-year deal in February. The Los Angeles native played college ball at Iowa State, and in 2014-2015, helped the Cyclones to a 25-9 record, a Big 12 Championship title and entry to the NCAA Tournament. He also played for the University of Southern California and University of Las Vegas.

He started 11 games for the Pelicans before a wrist fracture derailed his season.

Dejean-Jones impressed in his short time with the Pelicans, and coaching staff were hopeful for his future. “He surprised a lot of us,” Pelicans assistant coach Phil Webe said. “We’re excited to have a young player in the system that potentially could become a solid rotation guy.”

“It is with deep sadness that the Pelicans organization acknowledges the sudden passing of Bryce Dejean-Jones,” the team said in a statement. We are devastated at the loss of this young man’s life who had such a promising future ahead of him. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bryce’s family during this difficult time.”

A metal detecting enthusiast has fulfilled the dream of every amateur archaeologist after he unearthed a 2,000-year-old Roman ingot.

Jason Baker discovered the ‘very rare’ find – known as a pig – on a rally organised by the Southern Detectorists Club.

Mr Baker, who has only been metal detecting for 18 months, stumbled across the 2ft mining ingot on a farm in Wells, Somerset, with the ancient artefact inscribed with the name of emperor Marcus Aurelius Armeniacus.

The 31-year-old, from Plymouth, said the find of the ancient 38kg stone has ‘changed his life’.

He said: ‘Normally I find just a couple of Roman coins and that’s normally a good day, so to find something like this has just changed my life.

‘There’s been one sold – a smaller one – for £36,000 and I’ve heard a few reports of some fetching £250,000.’

Amateur detectorist Baker said there had been a ‘frenzy of finds’ so when his detector ‘went off’ he ‘knew it was something good’.

And according to Mr Baker, a member of staff from the Museum of Somerset in Taunton had been at the dig and said it was the ‘best thing he’d ever seen’.

He added: ‘When the Romans invaded Britain 2,500 years ago, they mined up the lead, cast it into big lead blocks and put the emperor’s name on it and sent it back to Rome.

‘Basically mine got lost on the process back to Rome,’ he said.

Sean McDonald, from the club, said the last Roman pig found was in the 18th century.

He added: ‘It is such a rare find it’s hard to put a price on it. A minimum would be £60,000 but it could go over that fivefold.

‘It doesn’t come under the Treasure Act because it’s made of lead – and not silver or gold – so Jason doesn’t have to split it 50:50 with the farmer.

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A petition has been launched urging police and zoo authorities to hold the parents of the child who entered a gorilla’s enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo – leading to its shooting – responsible for the “senseless death”.

Zoo officials shot Harambe, a critically-endangered 17-year-old gorilla, on Saturday after the 4-year-old climbed through a public barrier and fell into the Gorilla World moat.

Zoo officials said they shot the 400lb animal when the situation became “life-threatening” for the child. Harambe had picked the child up and had stayed with him for about 10 minutes.

Authorities said the child, who has not been identified, fell 10 to 12 feet.

He was taken to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where he is expected to recover. Hospital officials said they could not release any information on him.

Two female gorillas were also in the enclosure when the boy fell in but zoo officials said only the male remained with the child.

In footage recorded at the scene, the gorilla can be seen standing over the child in a corner of the enclosure for a few moments.

As he makes his way through the water, he stops and pulls the child onto his feet.

At one point a woman can be heard yelling: “Mummy’s right here.”

She later calls out to the boy, saying: “Mummy loves you.”

Maynard said the gorilla did not appear to be attacking the child, but he said the animal was “an extremely strong” and in an agitated situation.

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Nineteen people have been rescued from the English Channel after an inflatable boat they were in started taking on water, the British coastguard said on Sunday.

Kent Online website described the 19 as migrants.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency said in a statement that a call was made close to midnight on Saturday and the inflatable boat was found in the early hours of the morning by a search and rescue helicopter, lifeboats and rescue teams off the coast of the county of Kent.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants have risked their lives to come to Europe in flimsy boats, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

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A LEADING astronomer has discovered our universe may not be the only one and that there might be a parallel or alternate universe.

Ranga-Ram Chary was recently mapping the Cosmic Microwave Background – the light which was left from the Big Bang – when he noticed a “mysterious glow”.

Chary says that typically when scanning the Cosmic Microwave Background, you would find nothing but noise, but he added in his research paper that the bright spots were 4,500 times brighter than they should be.

He wrote in the study, Spectral Variations of the Sky: Constraints on Alternate Universes, that there is a 30 per cent chance that the glow is nothing out of the ordinary, but claimed that there is a chance it is being caused by two universes colliding.

He said: “It could also possibly be due to the collision of our universe with an alternate universe whose baryon to photon ratio is a factor of around 65 larger than ours.”

Chary, who is the US Planck Data Center’s project manager in California, added that another universe could be “leaking” into our own.

If either prove to be true, then it would mean that our universe is simply “a region within an eternally inflating super-region.”

However, other astronomers are skeptical of Chary’s claims, with Jens Chluba of the University of Cambridge, said: “This signal is one of the fingerprints of our own universe. Other universes should leave a different mark.”

However, Chluba added that more research is needed before a conclusion is reached.

He said: “To explain the signals that Dr Chary found with the cosmological recombination radiation, one needs a large enhancement in the number of [other particles] relative to photons.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: This sharp telescopic field of view holds two bright galaxies. Barred spiral NGC 5101 (top right) and nearly edge-on system NGC 5078 are separated on the sky by about 0.5 degrees or about the apparent width of a full moon. Found within the boundaries of the serpentine constellation Hydra, both are estimated to be around 90 million light-years away and similar in size to our own large Milky Way galaxy. In fact, if they both lie at the same distance their projected separation would be only 800,000 light-years or so. That's easily less than half the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. NGC 5078 is interacting with a smaller companion galaxy, cataloged as IC 879, seen just left of the larger galaxy's bright core. Even more distant background galaxies are scattered around the colorful field. Some are even visible right through the face-on disk of NGC 5101. But the prominent spiky stars are in the foreground, well within our own Milky Way.